Wake flooded with voter applications

Raleigh, N.C. — Wake County's Board of Elections workers stayed busy over the weekend processing voter applications in time for the Nov. 4 election.

“It keeps coming. It's not going to stop. We've got like three more weeks to go so we have tons of applications to process,” said Eva Diggs-Jardia, with Wake County Board of Elections.

Requests for absentee ballots are topping 1,000 a day. That number is even higher for new voter registration. Since May, 27,636 people have registered in Wake County for the first time.

Each day the Board of Elections receives as many as four bins full of new voter registration forms. By the end of this week, they expect that number to quadruple.

“It will be a record year no doubt,” said Gary Sims, deputy director of the Board of Elections in Wake County.

“This is just beyond our imagination,” Diggs-Jardia said.

“Since the 2004 election, we've picked up an extra 150,000 voters. So that's a pretty good bid,” Sims said.

People are being encouraged to vote early this year to avoid long lines on Nov. 4. Early voting sites will start going up this week in Wake County. There will be 15 sites open by October 23, the most ever set up.

For the first time, there will also be early voting in malls. Triangle Towne Center and Cary Towne Center will both have one stop voting sites set up inside.